Another flare-up occurred in 1930, resulting in a presidential commission that recommended ceding surface rights over federal lands to the Western states, but not underground mineral rights. The states held out for all or nothing, and they got nothing. When in 1934 the federal government imposed new regulations and fees on ranchers who grazed their cattle on federal land, western interests once again raised their voices in protest.

Throughout the long period between the Civil War and World War II, the federal government sent far more money westward than it took back. In effect, residents of the industrial states financed the development of western cities, dams and waterways, electrification and general infrastructure.

Ironically, it wasn’t until the 1970s, when the region emerged as a demographic and economic powerhouse, that regional politicians began seriously clamoring for an even bigger giveaway.

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The first Sagebrush Rebellion began in 1976, when a state commission in Nevada demanded that the attorney general “assert in the normal course of litigation, all possible claims the State of Nevada has to the public lands within its borders.” In 1978, the Legislature jumped into the fray with a resolution to the same effect, followed shortly thereafter by the establishment of the Western Coalition on Public Lands—a partnership of multiple state governments that laid claim to federal property within their state boundaries.

In June 1979, the Nevada Legislature went a step further with its enactment of the Sagebrush Rebellion Act, which flatly declared most federal land to be state property and established mechanisms for the state’s administration of the acreage. Unsurprisingly, the statute did not withstand court scrutiny, but not before the Legislatures of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, Washington and California passed similar measures. (In California, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the measure, while in Washington, voters killed it in a referendum.)

In part, the Sagebrush Rebellion reflected changing times. Between 1964 and 1980, Congress passed and successive presidents signed no fewer than 16 laws imposing new environmental restrictions on federal land, including limits on surface mining, grazing, oil extraction, recreation and development. Citizens who had grown accustomed over many decades to treating the land as a local, economic resource recoiled at the new regulations. President Jimmy Carter’s administration further fueled passions when it began enforcing a heretofore dormant rule that limited low-cost access to water flowing from assets controlled by the Board of Reclamation to 160-acre farms and ranches. In a region where water is currency, the proposal was enormously controversial, especially among larger landowners.

Carter’s Undersecretary of the Interior James Joseph got it rightin 1979 when he observed “the old interests which have for so long dictated public land policies have lost control.” The era of unfettered use of public land by private citizens and companies would necessarily give way to a more balanced policy that also took into consideration the right of all Americans to safeguard the environmental integrity of property that had always belonged to the entire country. “Many of you have been saying for years that more than the stockmen have a stake in how the public lands are grazed,” Joseph continued, “more than miners have a right to suggest how, when and where mining will be done on the public lands; more than loggers care—and may rightfully comment on how our timber resources are managed.”

Joseph concluded that the Sagebrush Rebels were simply displaying a classic, “time-honored response of the fellow who, finding he can no longer dictate the rules of the game, decided to take his ball and go home.”

The first Sagebrush Rebellion ultimately simmered, though it never quite died, for two reasons. First, the Reagan administration deftly appropriated the movement’s fervor without conceding much in the way of land. Though candidate Ronald Reagan told western voters in 1980, “I happen to be one who cheers and supports the Sagebrush Rebellion; count me in as a rebel,” and while his Interior Department did accelerate the rate of land privatization, the new administration didn’t fundamentally alter the equation under which approximately half of all western acreage remained in the possession of the federal government. Second, studies commissioned by the governors of Utah and Colorado revealed that their states would likely have lost money administering the acreage for which they clamored. Unless they sold the land off to private miners and developers, the upkeep costs were considerable.

Then as now, Western states continue to benefit from Washington’s ownership and management of federal lands. Without incurring the costs of conservation, reclamation and upkeep or the financial and legal liabilities associated with ownership, the states keep about 50 percent of revenue from mineral and timber extraction on federal acreage. The federal government also awards local governments grants to offset lost opportunities to levy property taxes on public land. Those are generous terms.

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The so-called Second Sagebrush Rebellion is remarkably similar to the discord that preceded it—not only in the late 1970s, but also 100 years ago, when Western states first began clamoring for outright land grants.

Then and now, citizens who’ve grown accustomed to thinking of public land as their own find it inconvenient to consider its history or to concede that it belongs to the entire country. A resident of New Jersey or Mississippi has no more right to set up a lemonade stand on a federal military installation than a resident of a Western state has a right to graze his cattle (for free or otherwise) on public acreage.

Sagebrush rebels aren’t unique in their tight perspective. It rarely occurs to middle-class opponents of food stamps that home mortgage deductions (which economists label “tax expenditures”) are another form of entitlement spending, just as many wealthy investors wear an expression of genuine befuddlement at the suggestion that the carried-interest rule is a form of welfare.

But we miss the mark if our focus remains fixed solely on the band of would-be militiamen near Burns, Oregon. The real responsibility lies with politicians who belittle dependency culture and extoll the virtues of personal thrift and responsibility, but who then clamor for a handout worth tens—perhaps hundreds—of billions of dollars for their constituents.